Recently, the concept of Virtualized Network Function has been introduced to apply Information Technology (IT) virtualization technologies to telecommunication network functions. In fact, this modern telecommunication infrastructure aims to leverage the benefits of deploying Network Functions onto a virtualized environment (e.g., Cloud infrastructure). These benefits are the improvement of, for example but not limited to, the dependability, the Quality of Experience (QoE). These benefits are also the reduction of Capital Expenses (CapEx) and Operating Expenses (OpEx).
However, telecommunication services, particularly but not limited to those of Evolved Packet Core (EPC), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Content Delivery Network (CDN), are run with large over provisioning that in cloud environment doesn't make sense given the elastic capabilities of scheduling and instantiating/releasing virtual resources. In order to take full advantage from the virtualized environment and the possibility of optimizing service chain resources on actual demand, the cloud infrastructure used to realize the network functions should provide a set of predictive analytics functionalities that are not present in the system or method of the state of the art.
It is also know the conference paper of Hadi Goudarzi et al. “Demand-side load scheduling incentivized by dynamic energy prices” published within the IEEE International conference on smart grid communications the 17 of Oct. 2011.